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LAN grab Nice piece by Damien Cave in today's Salon about ad hoc wireless LANs:
The nearest one is SFLan in San Francisco. It's really cool. Nodes are mostly around the Presidio (at places like "Noah's House" and "Brewster's House"). I want one at my house, which just happens to have a line-of-sight view to most of the Bay Area. (By the way, on the roof I have: a rotating TV antenna, a rotating FM antenna, a fixed FM antenna, a fixed FM transmitting antenna and a DishTV satellite antenna. Can you see any of them? How's that for clever architectue?) Anybody interested? Let me know The Barcoding of Consciousness
To Lasn, the U.S. is less an exemplar of democracy than an ironically failed revolt against corporate greed and power. The true history of the U.S., he says, is not the one we are taught in school: The unofficial history of the United States is quite different. It begins the same way -- in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial America -- but then it takes a turn. A bitplayer in the official history becomes critically important to the way the unofficial history unfolds. This player turns out to be not only the provocateur of the revolution, but in the end its saboteur. This player lies at the heart of America's defining theme: the difference between a country that pretends to be free and a country that truly is free. That player is the corporation. The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations. For example, he says The Boston Tea Party was not merely a revolt against British colonial rule, but also against the monopoly held on distribution by the East India Company, whose power was chartered by the crown — a power America's founders made sure would not be allowed in their new republic. All this is from Lasn's book Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America (which offers yet another fine barcode-as-brand image for our continuing series). Even though I don't share Lasn's belief that we live under "corporate rule," I love what he's doing to jam the culture we call "consumerism." I would rather characterize that culture as "producerism," but whatever we call it, Lasn and his magazine have been doing to screw it up than anybody else I can think of. For example, I just found out (through this Wall Street Journal article) that Buy Nothing Day (last Wednesday) was Lasn's idea. So are lots of other campaigns. Bravo.
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